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Smitten with Her

Caitlyn x Fem Reader

Synopsis: mild NSFW (R receiving), R’s introspective unspoken love letter to Caitlyn on her birthday, along with mostly fluff and slight angst.

This is a sequel to my Caitlyn Heritage Weekend work here, but it can also be read as a standalone.

TW: very mild body insecurities from R

WC: 1.3k

A/N: Happy birthday, Caitlyn 💙

I mainly write this for Caitlyn, myself, and the 2 other people who wanted a sequel. If you stumble upon and decide to read this story, I sincerely hope you enjoy it :)

P.S. It is my first time writing smut so forgive me if it sounds weird. (hides in a corner)

They’ve infested the CaitVi fandom and it’s really disappointing to see how many artists and writers are defending these freaks 😔

I think this is largely a generational gap thing where younger people just have not been exposed to dark themes interwoven with earlier queer fandom culture to the extent that older people have been

Something something these folks are desensitized and projecting onto arcane characters because it’s familiar .

'Shitting on people for condemning my incestuous/pedophilic content' is certainly a charged statement. I will say that I did not take the dogpiling sitting down this time because I felt that dogpiling on top of a charity zine for content that was not in a charity zine is counterproductive to doing good in the actual world. I said so accordingly. I said/implied that participating in the zine to donate to the PCRF is putting more good out there than harassing the charity zine.

And then folks got really mad.

Also, I genuinely didn't think I'd have to talk about this on tumblr, but the history behind this is that people went digging through an ao3 account I kept entirely separate with a Twitter account that was entirely separate, and then hounded me for months because of this, culminating recently in multiple people on twt asking me to die over stuff I'd written that literally wasn't related to arcane at all. All of which fictional. Also, you didn't ask but because people keep making it sound worse than it actually is (not that I would judge people for what they write), the 'incestuous pedophilic' ship was jjk lesbian twincest between two twins, one of who tragically died for the other, and where they kissed in canon.

TLT also has incestuous themes in it (amongst other dark things). As does Game of Thrones. What do people think Hades & Persephone is?? And yet the same people who get mad at me, a person who they think they can bully, will go on to like these concepts. Heck, I know some of the loudest voices in the fandom secretly ship vijinx. Which, you know who wouldn't harass you about that?

That's right, me.

All this bearing in mind that in the last year alone, I have written 112 fics for arcane, none of which are dark. My main account does not talk about the old fic. I do all the work to keep it separate but people who ostensibly don't want to see content like this just keep bringing it up every few months.

To what end?

I'm not looking for a platform on twt lol. I don't need people to follow me. I don't have a ko-fi nor do I have a patreon nor am I personally in need of money. All I was doing before this whole thing started was writing little snippets for artists. It was fun to engage with fandom like that! Then I try to do actual good like participate in a charity zine and voila.

I resent the implication here that I'm supposed to stay out of fandom forever because I have, in my past, written something that some people don't like.

I understand that dark content makes some folks uncomfortable btw, and I don't expect everyone to like it. But I think there's a huge difference between curating one's space (please feel free to mute or block) and yelling constantly (this is the 3rd attempt at driving me out of the fandom) about content you don't like.

6 hours and 58 minutes of fun (and mild suffering) on bow hunter Cait 😌🎯 (all summed up in 30 seconds below) Now I’m genuinely scared to find out how long coloring and rendering will take me 🫣

Taking the masculine woman, to highlight her "ignored femininity," making her meek, insecure bottom, only troubled by taking care of her family, once the generous provider's money solves her family problems, making her wait around with no ambition or future plans for herself so her provider partner makes a decision she will go along with is not really a groundbreaking subversion. It reeks, "look, she is the wife stereotype, a *woman* after all"

None of this is supported by canon, and it is how a lot of fanfics go, one side of Twitter thinks, but I say this is even more heteropatriarchal with a dash of unconscious transphobia. "Vi might not look like the average woman to some, but she is the most feminine womanly woman because she shows emotion/had defined curves in season 1, has a round face" is bioessentialist transphobe talk.

I get that both sides want their fav to not be defined by stereotypical femininity because canon characters are above it. But pushing every patriarchal feminine ideal to the other side of the coupling is not it.

You've come to my inbox with a lot of claims none of which have evidence or supporting material, almost raring for a fight. Would you like to bring up some specific examples? Because certainly my twitter experience has not been one that substantiates any of these claims. Do there exist fics that contain these tropes? In a fandom of 17k fics, probably. Is it pervasive? In my experience, most certainly not. Also, are these tropes as sinisterly crafted as you're implying? I also don't think so.

Honestly, I was going to take this as a genuine attempt at conversation but then I spoke to my partner who said "they have so many feelings and yet put none of them towards substantiating the arguments or providing evidence for any of it."

I just want people to acknowledge that Caitlyn doesn't always have to be the most feminine woman who has ever lived, and neither does Vi have to always be the most masculine woman who has ever lived. There's a whole spectrum between that and it's most certainly not bioessentialist or transphobic to suggest that Vi be allowed to wear makeup, or a dress, or, god forbid, bottom.

honestly if you've been reading what i've been ranting about, it shouldn't come as a surprise.

I love Caitlyn because I find her fascinating. She's fiery. She's such a strong personality. She's so kind. She never makes Vi do anything Vi doesn't want but it's not because she can't, it's cos she's considerate and thoughtful enough that she actively chooses not to. (We see this with Ekko too, in S1 with the hexgem.) Caitlyn's also not a pushover who just listens to everything Vi says, she's someone who's really good at taking in new information and processing it for herself then making the decision on what to do from there. (She doesn't betray Ambessa simply for Vi. Vi looking for Vander provided her the perfect opportunity to rope Vi into her plans that had already been slowly forming ever since that Singed conversation.)

And it pisses me the hell off because in the fandom, to so many people, she's none of those things. Caitlyn's not a cardboard cutout. She's remarkably well fleshed out but peope have just been choosing not to see.

I genuinely think there are swathes of the fandom for whom Caitlyn is simply the girlfriend of Vi. OfVi, if I may. To them she's not her own character, she's simply the hanger-on, the plus-one, the simpering receptacle, the femme to the butch, the 'woman' to the 'man'.

So we'll get, for example, these weird takes from the fandom of Caitlyn being freaky but then also being shy such that her desire for kinky sex is wrapped in layers of degradation/shame (kink is sooo much more than degradation/shame, please for the love of god i need them to open their eyes). We get people using eating disorder twt photos of really thin women as 'oh this is so Cait' and we have people taking the most sexualized kpop videos and begging artists to Caitlyn-ify it.

(The only time we see Caitlyn's shoulders are when she is recovering from her injuries. Every other time she is buttoned up to the top. At home, at work, wherever. And yet you'll look at art just randomly floating down the TL and it'll be Caitlyn in a skimpy outfit next to Vi fully dressed. One of these characters wears a turtleneck. One of these characters wore bandages/binding under a leather jacket. You know which one.)

And then they translate this to jealous pillow princess Caitlyn but where did this even come from like, Caitlyn the person who'd clearly at least tried to move on with Maddie vs Vi the one who was hallucinating Cait the whole time? Cait who took the initiative to reassure a shaky Vi with their first kiss? I'm not saying it's impossible but you gotta put in the work to persuade me and not just 'well she's the woman in the relationship' which honestly they'd never say out loud but it's pretty clear.

Like we'll get comphet Caitlyn and but almost never comphet Vi. We'll get people using straight couple references and 95% of the time, Vi will be the Man even if she's shorter, and the 5% will get harassed out of their minds. The one time a friend dared to draw Vi as 'the woman' even without putting either of them in gendered dress? People got soooo mad.

Oh have I mentioned Arcane Vi is shorter? Cos people sure like to forget. Caitlyn is taller than Vi. Markedly so. I think it's cute! I don't know why people keep ignoring it!

And skintones too, like for some strange reason people sure like to make Vi the darker one when actually there's no reason for this? Vi's the white one who was locked up in prison for so, so fucking long. Like sure, East Asians can be and are sometimes pale but ya'll making it real weird. (the masc one doesn't always have to be darker yo.)

And the kicker, as defense, people loooove to point out how feminine Caitlyn skins in League are but will never refer to the Vi skins in the same vein. Not once. They'll redraw them so Caitlyn has the same figure that she does (and she does have a great figure) but Vi will lose all curves instantly. Gone.

She's expected to be the perfect girlfriend, to take everything thrown at her, to have a fathomless capacity for forgiveness, to take everything, to hold up the world, to feel bad about being rich. But she isn't allowed competence, isn't given agency, isn't allowed to unabashedly have desires, isn't allowed to be in control at all. What do you want from her then???

In every. single. aspect when it comes to this fandom the double standards for Caitlyn are horrific. It reeks of misogyny, of Caitlyn being put into 'the woman' role while Vi is slotted into 'the man' one and for a ship that is ostensibly about two lesbians, it blows my mind.

So yes, you asked, how do sizeable swathes of the fandom invalidate Caitlyn's identity?

It's really straightforward.

They don't see her at all.